How long does it take to read Dept of Speculation?
Jenny Offill
Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill takes about 3 hours 25 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 25 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2014. 186 pages, about 51,150 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 41 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 25 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 8 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes--a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it, as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel."--
Subjects: Marriage, Fiction, Families, Family life, Literary, Psychological
